Hacks

The reMarkable tablets are running Linux, and they provide an easy way to SSH into the tablet as root, so unlike many other devices, there's no need to "root" or otherwise "break into" the tablet.

Because of this, there's a whole community of people who have come up with ways to modify how the unit works.

I already know that I'll be SSH'ing into mine and customizing things, and I've started collecting bookmarks for some of these "hacks". As I look at each one in more detail, I'll update this page or, if it makes sense, add separate pages for some of them.

List of Hacks

awesome-reMarkable is a list of hacks compiled by others. Almost all of the hacks I've seen are linked from this page.

ℹ️ To be totally clear, I am NOT trying to start my own "index of hacks" here. When I'm finished (or if I'm finished?) this site will contain information about the hacks I actually use on my own tablet, and maybe the ones that I look at but decide not to use.

Please do not look at this page as "the ultimate list of reMarkable hacks".

Hacks - On My Tablet

So far the only "hack-ish" things I've done with my tablet are ...

• Enabling SSH access.

  The ability to SSH into the tablet is built into the reMarkable software, so I don't really think of this as a "hack". It's just something that reMarkable, unlike most other consumer electronics companies, decided not to prevent users from doing.

  ⇒ The SSH Access page documents this.

  For the record, this was also a big part of what convinced me to spend the money. If SSH access was not easily available, I wouldn't have bought the tablet.

• Created some scripts.

  These are simple "system administration" scripts that I use to make backups of my tablet, list the contents, and clean up some files that the built-in software doesn't delete if the tablet isn't linked to a cloud account.

  ⇒ Scripts

• Created some templates.

  I read through How to Make Template Files for Your reMarkable, which includes a LOT of information, including what I needed - details about the file formats, where to upload them, and how to make the reMarkable software use them.

  ⇒ Templates

• Started using RCU (reMarkable Connection Utility). This is a GUI for managing the RM1/RM2 tablets without using the reMarkable cloud.

  It's not free, but ... it's only $12, which isn't bad.

  ⇒ RCU - my page, on this site

  ⇒ RCU - official web site, where you can find documentation, and buy and download it yourself.

• goMarkableStream is a program which runs on the tablet, which streams the contents of the display to a web browser running on your computer. I had a minor issue getting it to work, but the developer pointed out what I was doing wrong, and a few minutes later it was working perfectly.

  ⇒ goMarkableStream

Hacks - Not Tried Yet

This is a list of "hacks" that look interesting to me. I plan to look at them in more detail in the future.

In no particular order ...

• Toltec looks like a third party software repository for the reMarkable tablets, similar to Homebrew for macOS. Some of the "hacks" I've looked at so far say they require packages installed from it.

  • Github repo

• regitable - Make the tablet automatically commit and upload backups to a git repo. Uses git-lfs to store large files outside the repo itself, so the files in the .git directory don't contain duplicate copies of larger files.

  Obviously this means that the tablet needs a network connection in order to push changes to the repo. My tablet has never connected to wifi at all, so I haven't been able to try this yet.

  Also ... git works by storing copies of past commits on the local machine. Using git-lfs should mean that it will only be storing pointers to past files, so that'll help, but the tablet only has about 6.5 GB of available storage, so ... depending on how long it's been since you started the repo history, I can see this as yet another thing competing for the limited storage space on the tablet itself.

• recept - Uses an LD_PRELOAD hack to intercept the communications with the screen digitizer (which reads the pen) and "averages" the sample positions to "smooth out" the lines. (Not super easy to explain, but the page has an example which shows the difference.)

• rM-signature-patch - modifies the xochitl executable (the reMarkable software itself) to remove the advertisement that it adds to the bottom of every email it sends out.

  This one is also a simple script, and in fact I've opened a pull request against it, to only require opkg (the Toltec package installer) if perl needs to be installed. (I'm sure Toltec isn't the only way to install Perl on the tablet.)

• Calibre Remarkable Device Driver Plugin - a plugin for Calibre which allows it to manage ebook files on the tablet, the same way it manages other ebook readers (i.e. kobo, kindle, nook, etc.)

  ❌ This doesn't work with the reMarkable 3.x firmware, so I can't use it right now. If it gets updated to work with the newer firmware, I am very interested in trying it out.

Hacks I Am Not Using

Nothing against them, they're just not for me. I'm listing them here because I did look at them, and they could be suitable for you. (For the record, if I look at any hacks and decide that I don't like them for some reason, they will not be listed here at all.)

• rm-sync - Shell script which uses curl to upload files to the tablet, and scp to download/backup files from the tablet. It looks simple enough, but I already have an rsync-based backup solution that I've been using for 15+ years, and I'm able to manually restore files if I ever need to, so I'm sticking with what I know.

  With that said, the idea of using curl to upload EPUB/PDF files is now in the back of my brain, and if I need to write a script for that, I'll probably come back and use the same curl command line he's using to do it.

• reMarkable Printer - makes the tablet emulate a printer. When a computer "prints" to it, the output is saved as a new document (PDF?) on the tablet. (The same thing can be done using the "Print to PDF" functionality built into macOS, then uploading the PDF to the tablet.)

  This functionality is built into RCU, so unless something happens and I decide to stop using RCU, I probably won't actually try this one.

• reStream - Stream your reMarkable screen over SSH. Can be used with a screen-capture utility to record movies of what's on the tablet's screen.

  I'm using goMarkableStream for this, so I probably won't look at reStream in detail.